This is a somewhat surprising story, especially considering it was written by a woman. I don't know much about Amy Twigg: what the book flap says is all that can be found about her online: that she is English – and seems quite young (her age is not stated anywhere) – that she studied creative writing and that with Rotten Creatures she won the BPA Pitch Prize and caused quite a stir. It is a story that begins in a, let's say, inadvertently routine way. Iris (thirty-two years old) decides to enter a women's commune –the House of the Left— to see if her precarious life reality improves. She does so, attracted by one of the residents in the house, the mysterious Hazel. At the head of the domestic matriarchy is Blythe, a vigorous and decisive woman.The profile of those who were welcomed there can be imagined: “Not all of them were fleeing violence. There were women who came because they were exhausted from the eight-hour workday, from working to pay for a house where they barely lived and from promotions that never came. Women tired of frustrating dates and of heating meals in the microwave, of receiving unsolicited dick pics and of traffic jams. Of fiddling with their keys when they returned home and it was dark, of covering their drink with their hand so that nothing would be put in it, of not drinking a sip because the waiter had given them a bad vibe”.A safe space for women?

So far everything is in order. The House of the Left seems like one of those safe spaces for women, where they can exercise sorority with freedom and joy. But no. What will happen, and is announced in the text almost immediately, is unexpected. We could say that the novel begins like Terra d’elles and ends like The Lord of the Flies. Herland (Herland) is a science fiction utopia by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It deals with a society inhabited solely by women where order, peace, and rationality prevail. This gynaecotopia presents a cooperative collectivity in which competitive relationships have been transformed into relationships of solidarity. Somewhere in South America, three million Amazons live happily in cooperation and communion with nature. They reproduce by parthenogenesis and have managed to conceive only daughters. Their religion is maternal pantheism. A motherhood that is transversal to society, influencing all arts and industries, absolutely protecting all children and providing them with the most perfect care and education. Herland is the second volume of a trilogy and was originally published in 1915. It was translated by Jordi Vidal and published in Catalan in 2002.The Lord of the Flies, in turn,is a more well-known novel. It was published in 1954 by William Golding, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It deals with a group of young British boys stranded on a desert island who try to self-govern with chilling results. It is a fable about the innate drives of violence in the individual that made a fortune (the volume was translated by Manuel de Pedrolo and published in Catalan in 1966).Well then, everything that happens in the supposedly ideal space of the House of the Left will reveal the contradictions of human nature (male and female alike). The love story of Iris with Hazel (the left of the story) will evolve, but so will, for the worse, the relationships between the resident women and Blythe's own moods. The male intervention, however, does not help, but rather precipitates events.Do not reveal anything if I write that things will end badly, as the narrator repeatedly warns us. What seemed like a feminist parable ends up becoming her nemesis. But Amy Tigg's narrative flow flows so smoothly and so well-oiled that we fall into it without realizing it. And so passes the glory of the world (and of women).

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